Yes, Resto 2pc T10 is THAT good
If you aren’t wearing two pieces of T10 yet, I’m going to spell out this beautiful bonus for you:
(2) Set: Your Riptide spell grants 20% spell haste for your next spellcast within 10 sec.
Just think about how great this is. You cast one Riptide and your next spell is going to get 20% spell haste. Riptide has a 6 sec CD, so you can proc this buff called Rapid Currents very often, every 6 seconds that is. 20% spell haste brings my CH unbuffed from 1.9 down to 1.6. Impressive, isn’t it? This Tier bonus is great because of two things: 1. It has a high value in terms of HEP and 2. it brings an additional layer of depth into shaman healing.
Let’s talk about the HEP thing first: stassart has included the Bonus in his great shaman_hep program. I ran this with a log from a Rotface kill and some 10 Putricide attempts. That’s the results I got for my Tier bonuses:
Set Bonus Report:
Tier 9 2-piece:
HEP: 217.6783
Tier 10 2-piece:
“Shaman T10 Restoration 2P” (655 haste rating) buff uptime: 33 mins 24 secs (34.23%)
HEP: 420.3783
420 HEP for one little tiny set bonus? Is this crazy talk? Well to be honest, I doubt it’s as good as those numbers would make you believe. Stassart calculates the HEP value of the T10 bonus like that:
It looks at the SPELL_AURA_APPLIED and SPELL_AURA_REMOVED events in the combatlog for sid 70806 (Rapid Currents). It monitors the buff whether you are in combat or out of combat, but the time only starts when you enter combat and stops when you exit combat.
For example, if you cast riptide then cast chain heal the buff is up from when the riptide lands until the chain heal finishes.
It’s using uptime in combat not overall log uptime. Since shaman can’t rez other people in combat, using it out of combat to rez would have no effect on its uptime in general. That said if other people in the raid are in combat and you aren’t and you are rezing, it counts that as combat time.
So stassart calculates the uptime of the Rapid Currents buff, converts it into haste rating and uptime x haste rating value = HEP. This isn’t all wrong but it isn’t rocket science either. The problem: You have a higher HEP value the longer you wait between casting Riptide and then casting the next spell. I see though why stassart calculates it that way. From the moment you cast Riptide you have in fact 655 haste rating up to the moment your next healing spell lands. But it isn’t quite correct to give this haste the same value as static haste. Even if you have the haste in theory, you only benefit from it from the beginning of a cast following riptide until this cast ends. The way stassart calculates it, I guess movement heavy fight will get much higher HEP values, because you might cast Riptide while running, keep running for some seconds and thus make the Rapid Currents buff last longer. While a very stationary fight might result in lower HEP values, because you use the buff up right after casting Riptide.
Nevertheless, this bonus is great. It’s 655 haste rating for every heal following a Riptide. Even if the HEP value might be a tad lower than shaman_hep suggests, it’s easily the best Tier bonus in game.
Especially because it isn’t just a throughput bonus, no it will affect the way you play. Riptide has always been a great spell, it’s pretty low on the mana cost side, especially because of the synergy with IWS, it is instant and the HoT, while prone to overhealing, is a great asset to our healing arsenal. And now Riptide is even more worth casting whenever possible because of our lovely 2pc T10 bonus. Choosing the spell following RT is now a much more tactical decision than it was before:
- RT/LHW: Do you remember the times when Tidal Waves used to apply haste to LHW? When you got those ultra-fast LHWs? The combo is back, one instant RT followed by a really fast LHW can solve a lot of problems. Remember one thing though: LHW is very likely to be cast in under 1 sec, while the GCD will still be 1 sec. So while it’s nice to have a heal land sooner, casts shorter than 1 sec aren’t ideal HPS wise. This isn’t a reason NOT to cast LHW after a RT, not at all. It’s just something to keep in mind.
- RT/HW: This was a good choice for burst healing with Tidal Waves alone, but now we can combine Tidal Waves haste with 2pc T10 bonus haste and we get an ultra fast HW. self-buffed (WoA), my HW is at 1.1 after RT, LHW is at 0.9. This is a pretty small difference. Cave: HW is very mana hungry, LHW isn’t. HW is higher HPS, but also higher MPS, choose the places for a RT/HW combo wisely.
- RT/CH: Last but not least my favorite. Up until now, RT didn’t have a direct affect on CH via Tidal Wavs (the only synergy between RT and CH includes consuming the RT HoT). I often used to fire a LHW after RT to use up a Tidal Waves Charge and only then cast a slow CH. Now RT/CH is pure love. If there isn’t someone dropping dangerously low (RT/LHW) or you get heavy predictable burst damage on a tank (RT/HW) there really isn’t a good reason not to fire RT/CH as often as possible.
This only leaves one question: Which pieces should you get? Shoulders and Helm! Which T9 Pieces should you stick to? Chest and Gloves! Especially if you’re sporting 245 or even 258 T9. In my shaman_hep report, my 2pc T9 bonus was worth 200 HEP (around 120 might be more typical though) so it isn’t hard to calculate how good upgrades have to be to make it worth loosing 2pc T9. As far as additional pieces of Tier loot go: Be patient until some guys get to test 4pc T10. If you can’t wait: the chestpiece is very well itemized, so this would be a great item number three.
I’ll end this post with my actual HEP values, Plagueworks bosses, 25 man content. 2770 Bonus healing, 942 haste. Might be a good reference if working with shaman_hep is too much trouble for you.
Shaman Healing Equivalency Points:
1 SP = 1
1 mp5 = 0.7300 (calculated)
1 mana = 0.0123
1 Haste rating = 1.8727
1 Crit rating = 0.9449
1 INT = 0.6843 (actual)
1 INT = 0.8653 (max theoretical)
Additional thoughts are welcome.
A Coin of Ancestry
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Toravon the Ice Watcher (25 player)
1500 Dungeon & Raid Emblems
i almost wet my pants when i first saw this bonus, can´t wait to play with it myself
Then again, getting 155 Emblems of Frost is quite insane for an alt
Maybe I shouldn’t have bought the Belt first after all, but it was the biggest upgrade available…
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I understand the position you’re in. I wanted to write a post about Emblem of Frost pick order but I’m not sure I’m going to do it. People get such different numbers of Emblems, the difference between someone who does 25 and 10 mans and someone who does an occasional daily is just huge.
The dilemma is this: should I recommend someone to save up those 155 just to get the 2pc T10 bonus, even if those 251 iLvl items might not be such a huge upgrade over the 232 pieces you might be already wearing? Or should I recommend getting non-Tier pieces first, where many if you might still be wearing 213/19 pieces, so upgrading to 264 is huge.
For someone doing mainly heroics/10 mans, the 2pc T10 bonus might be a little bit weaker, because nothing benefits as much from this bonus as CH. For HW it’s great as well for very quick burst healing. A quick LHW is cool as well, but it’s wasted haste in terms of HPS.
I think I’d lean towards getting 2pcT10 anyway asap because the bonus isn’t just a boring healing modifier, it will make healing more fun and the use of RT more tactical. Also, both pieces look veeeehry cool. If you start collecting now, you might even get lucky with a piece from VoA and see the bonus earlier than expected.
I completely understand the pitfulls of doing a “grab this first” emblem list–sadly, first thing on my list was the cloak.
I’m really looking forward to getting the bonus to see how riptide and chain heal play together. I tend to be somewhat maniacal about keeping riptides up, so I imagine that it’s going to be pure win.
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Exactly my sentiment about the 2-piece bonus–it is simply amazing in terms of throughput. I appreciate that it harkens back to the original days of Tidal Waves, while supporting single-target healing shamans all the more. Though I haven’t been able to give it too much of a try-out, I’ll likely be changing my tank-healing cycle to something like RT/HW/LHW/LHW, so that I can stick in a lower-haste, high-crit set without losing out on the high hps of HW because of the comparatively long cast time sans RT haste.
I do see a couple of consequences to this amazing bonus, however. First, if you’re not a shaman who works in RT all that often, you won’t see as much of a benefit as someone who casts it regularly, even when raid healing. Secondly, it makes damage anticipation all that much more important, since you can see a huge benefit of having Rapid Currents up when raid damage hits.
Can’t wait to assemble some logs for this week’s ICC, to see how I compare!
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ARGH.
This is exactly what I just posted about. I have been gunning for 2 piece T10 and 2 piece T9 this whole time, and have been a little slow with Emblems of Frost because I went on vacation.
Then last night, I got a helm upgrade that’s stat-wise better than the T10 helm for me… So hard to upgrade a 251 with a 251… but I gotta do it I guess.
BTW, what version of HEP did you use to get that number? If you still have the log file you got that with, would you mine running that with the new version (3.11)? Stassart made a fix to re-value the t10 set bonus. It’s still great, but you probably won’t get quite so high a number.
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I re-ran the log with the new shaman_hep version and I get significantly lower numbers (120 vs 430, 2pcT9=210). I don’t think though the new formula for the 2pcT10 is that much better, the numbers are really really low and I absolutely think the 2pcT10 is a better bonus than 2pcT9 HEP-wise.
I’m pretty sure the “truth” is somewhere in the middle. Also, the haste boost from the bonus is huge, so there is additional “i-can-heal-faster-so-people-don’t-die” benefit, which is really hard to quantify.
Every shaman who casts RT a lot will profit a lot from this bonus.
Yeah alright, you convinced me to go with the helm after all. The synergy of 2 pc t10 and 2 pc t9 are too awesome to pass up at this point… and the legs are so bad I can’t even look at them.
I should have it by tomorrow, I think, I’ll try to post my HEP numbers to compare maybe by Monday.
Oh man, and I just realized, after I get this I can finally compete with those resurrection-sniping Borrowed Time disc priests.
The only thing I saw that seems weird is, “Up until now, RT didn’t have any impact on CH…” Are we ignoring the 25% increase to CH from RT for some reason I don’t know of, or are you just saying that RT has never effected CH’s haste.
Just want to make sure I’m not missing something
Yeah I rephrased this sentence. What I wanted to say is this: There was no direct benefit from casting RT/CH up to now, as Tidal Waves doesn’t affect CH. Now you get a huge haste boost with RT/CH. Of course there already was the indirect synergy between RT and CH, which consumes the RT HoT but adds 25% healing to CH.
Consuming the RT HoT isn’t always a good thing, as CH is often already overhealing a lot and if I’m tank healing I’d prefer to have a hot rolling over a stronger CH. A grid setup, showing me the duration of RT HoT helps a lot, so I don’t always clip RT HoTs to early.
I was just wondering if this bonus works like borrowed time does. cause if so then the bonus haste should work on instant cast spells without consuming the rapid currents buff. could someone check it out?
I just recently switched back to my resto shaman after a rather lengthy hiatus. I have mostly have Uld25/Naxx25 gear, including the chest, head, and pants of t8.5. How useful do you think the 2T8 bonus would be in conjunction with the 2T10. Should I stick with 2T8 or move on up to 2T9?
I went with gloves/shoulders and plan to round out 4 set with chest/helm.
The crafted legs are itemized very well and so are the boots, with yellow gems slot to boot. This means the only piece that isn’t itemized well are the gloves, which are the lower gear slot between gloves/legs and I can’t verify there are any mail crit/haste gloves in ICC (but that hasn’t stopped me before).
Anything I can get with badges to save DKP for trinkets/weapons/cloaks/necks is a plus.
So, my resto Shaman is an alt and his t-9 is all 232. Does it still make sense to keep the 2pc t-9 bonus if you are not in 245 ilvl stuff or would it ultimately be better to get to the 2pc t-10 asap, i.e. going shoulders/gloves? I’ve also gotten lucky with the 251 helm out of 10-icc, which seems like it is very nicely itemized for us, so that makes the math more complicated as well. If i had 245 2-pc it would seem like a no-brainer, but i’m leaning towards dropping the t-9 gloves and thus that bonus to get to t-10 bonus more quickly.
thanks for a great blog!
I’m an HEP hater for things like this (sorry!), but I have been having an absolute field day with the 2p so far. The way it has changed my healing is astronomical. Shaman’s have alot of variety in our small kit and I feel even more versatile with this bonus. I can’t really explain how or why, but I just feel like a stronger healer since I’ve gotten this bonus.
Interesting that your crit parses lower than SP for you, in all my recent reports, both 10man and 25man, I have had crit anywhere from 1,2 to 1,7 SP, and haste from 1,6 SP upwards to ~2,5SP.
Weird, in any case.
Really very nice post. My gameplan changed after i get my t10 bonus. Don’t forget about VoA. You can get ur hand and leg piece there. see